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Priced out of home ownership

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Re: Priced out of home ownership

#491

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

tmnvix wrote: post #274

People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price infla…

Ugh. Another “it’s not X” post…

Yes, it is. It’s everything.

It’s inflation.

It’s that none of the countries you mentioned built anything during the covid craze (word selected specifically).

It’s regulation and complexity and permitting and zoning.

It’s AirBNB.

It’s remote work.

It’s manipulated stock markets and poor returns on other investments.

It’s blackrock and VCs and MBAs.

It’s out of country investors.

It’s everything.

So why these reductionist “well, I know it isn’t X” posts are supposed to be insightful, I have no idea.

Who told you it needs to be one thing, or can be disproven as one thing?

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#492

Post by mdorazio »

novok wrote: post #485
itake wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree building housing is a symptom, and not the core problem. But I'm skeptical that increasing building or density would actually lower housing costs. If that were true, high dense cities like Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, or Hong Kong would have much lower cost housing. Housing more people in a concentrated area creates more demand for services, which creates more demand for housing which jacks up prices. Pac…

Tokyo does have cheaper housing at a income : cost ratio and is growing in population.

Depending whose numbers you believe, Tokyo stopped growing around 2018 and has been slightly shrinking since. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/21671/toky...

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#493

Post by tmnvix »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #473
tmnvix wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not denying that the number of properties relative to people has an effect - but I am arguing that this is insufficient as an explanation for what has happened with regard to prices recently. See my earlier comment regarding NZ. The number of homes per 1000 people changed very little between 2011 and 2022. At the same time prices went from NZD350k to NZD900k. I think my suggestion that finance is the most signif…

You clearly did not look at any of my sources. >I think my suggestion that finance is the most significant factor here is a stronger argument than a supply shortage. You have zero evidence for this claim and cited zero sources. >The number of homes per 1000 people changed very little between 2011 and 2022. At the same time prices went from NZD350k to NZD900k. You cannot look at an entire country's housing/population…

Do you think that a shift in demographic preferences from certain locations in NZ to other locations in NZ is sufficient to explain why - while the overall proportion of dwellings to people was steady - prices rose 250% in 10 years?

Are you sure finance wasn't the main cause?

sources: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HM1-1-Housing-stock-and-cons... https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/pacific/new-zealand/home...

Edit: Also compare what happened to the money supply over the same period: 2011(NZD180 billion) to 2022(NZD400 billion). https://tradingeconomics.com/new-zealand/money-supply-m3

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#494

Post by dogcomplex »

pfdietz wrote: post #439
killjoywashere wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fix is public policy producing housing in order to force a situation of excess supply. So... we should have paid builders to build more houses during the pandemic?

Eliminate regulations and laws limiting supply.

Or increase planning department funding with higher emphasis on throughput. It's the bureaucratic delay (nearly a year for approvals or revisions in many places) that causes much of the pain, not the regulations themselves.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#495

Post by thelastgallon »

lr1970 wrote: post #181
oooyay wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live on a sleepy street that's half dense housing and half single family homes. Density will likely take over more than half of the street some day because the city has been relegating more dense housing to the working class areas of the city, which is where I happen to live. [1] Of those single family homes there is one that was owner-occupied for a year when we moved in. Since, it's been locked up and has had no…

> It perplexes me, and the rest of our neighborhood, how someone can float a mortgage, much less an investment mortgage, without a renter. In the USA it is happening all the time because, surprisingly, landlords have little skin in the the game. LLC is the name of the game. Each investment property is "owned" by its own LLC that bares 100% of risks and liabilities associated with the property and shields the landlord…

No bank loans 100%, investment homes require 25% downpayment.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#496

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #196
DGAP wrote: post #180

Stop subsidizing demand at the national level. Stop restricting supply at the local level.

That's not the problem at all. Stop allowing people to buy multiple homes. Stop allowing landlords to "collaborate" on prices.

> Stop allowing landlords to "collaborate" on prices.

lol. Yes, I remember at the 2022 landlords meeting we all decided to raise rents… because we never thought of that before!!

Surely it has nothing to do with taxes and inflation, no, as a renter you should be shielded from that and we should pay it without passing it on!

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#497

Post by pkaye »

phoehne wrote: post #188
speeder wrote: post #104

I live in Portugal and here the situation is outright ridiculous. 1. There are a ridiculous amount of abandoned properties, when I walk the streets of major cities, sometimes more than half of the buildings even in expensive areas are boarded-up. 2. Meanwhile I am afraid of being homeless soon, I lost my job recently, and the unemployment benefit I can receive is literally half of my rent. Thing is, there is no "wors…

I'm not sure if it's the case in your location, but sometimes foreign buyers come in and buy properties they don't expect to inhabit (unless something goes really bad in their country). Europe and the US have strong rule of law systems that prevent the state from just taking property. (The government charging you with a bogus criminal charge to justify taking their property in in their home country). It's also an ass…

This is what I could find about foreign buyers of residential property in the US for the last year.

* $53.3B purchase volume

* 84600 foreign buyers (1.8% of total)

* Buyers are recent immigrants (* Top buyers are from China (13%), Mexico (11%), Canada (10%), India (7%) and Colombia (3%).

https://cdn.nar.realtor//sites/default/files/documents/2023-...

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#498

Post by Izkata »

feoren wrote: post #483
MainlyMortal wrote: post #443

U.K. view here... and I'd guess this applies the the majority of the world too. I was born in, grew up in and currently live in a location that the HN community never even thinks about. Most people in here have no idea of how the regular 99% live and then base their whole world view on expensive capital cities and hold the strangest views of housing. I bought my current house in the 2010s, my mortgage is still half t…

Hot take: already own a house and live somewhere with a livable minimum wage. You are the one who sounds like you are completely unaware of your own privilege. You just said that where you live, if you were on minimum wage, you could "manage to" pay for half the price of renting. Think hard about what you just said here. You are saying that someone on minimum wage can't nearly afford to rent. But their problem is the…

I think the warped view is that renting is always cheaper than owning. You jumped straight there yourself, only arguing about cost of renting and not even touching ownership.

For example in Chicago in the US, at least in the early 2010s, it was also flipped like in GP's area: My monthly mortgage payment was around a third of the rent I had been paying, for a far far better place.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#499

Post by estebank »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #451
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price infla…

> is there maybe some other common cause? Immigration. It's not that immigrants buy up the houses (opposites, we tend to live cramped up in flat shares). It's that they support landlords profits (with cream on top of not knowing your rights) and have overall pressure on market. Building should at least match immigration/population growth. Also not building dense enough. Kiwis always tout "I wouldn't wanna live in a h…

I reject the idea that not having a backyard means that that property is shitty.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#500

Post by seanmcdirmid »

alexpetralia wrote: post #373
shuckles wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. In my experience, people "intuitively" jump to basically every conclusion besides this one. "Greedy landlords" or "[favorite scapegoat] collusion" are intuitive conclusions which are far more common than supply and demand. > Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same ina…

Asian countries have a lot more people and build a lot more housing.

And yet housing prices in much of Asia is still insane. The only market that is sane is sort of Japan with a falling population and an aversion to property speculation due to getting burned on their last property bubble.

Chinese housing market is completely messed up, with turn over almost halted since the government won’t let prices fall no matter what, while they have overbuilt like crazy.

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